URL shortening service Bit.ly has been growing at an aggressive rate as they have become the default for Twitter. Given their current growth rate, the company needed another injection of cash as they have raised $1.5 million from previous investors. These investors include Betaworks, SoftTech (Jeff Clavier), Ron Conway, Mitch Kapor, Chris Sacca, O’Reilly AlphaTech Ventures, and Howard Lindzon. The funding was added to an SEC filing and TechCrunch confirmed the round with Bit.ly President John Borthwick. The $1.5 million round was set up as a convertible debt note. Bit.ly received 2.7 billion clicks last month. last week alone about 744 million Bit.ly links were clicked on. [TechCrunch]
Bit.ly has launched a Pro service that allows custom short URLs owned by publication companies to have analytics services. Bit.ly will provide the analytics technology behind the custom short URLs owned by the publication companies. As part of the beta program, publications with short URLs such as AOL, TechCrunch, IGN, The Wall Street Journal, GDGT, MTV, MSN, and The Huffington Post will have reports on how many people clicked on a link, where the visitors came from, etc.
A dashboard will be added to the real-time analytics service provided by Bit.ly. This is very useful to publication companies that experience volumes of traffic from Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, e-mail, IM services, and SMS. Below are a couple of screenshots of the new service. The announcement was made on the Bit.ly blog.
The short URL battle is heating up as Google and Facebook have entered the mix. Google’s short URL is called goo.gl and Facebook’s short URL is fb.me.
Bit.ly is the biggest URL shortening service thanks to the popularity of Twitter. Given that websites and files are masked by Bit.ly, spammers and virus artists are taking advantage of the situation. A normal message may be followed by a Bit.ly URL that links to a malicious website. In a blog post from earlier today, Bit.ly announced that they are partnering with VeriSign, Websense, and Sophos to scan through links and identify which of them are spam are viruses. Bit.ly has about $2 million in funding and became the Twitter default URL shortening service in May 2009. Bit.ly is based in New York City.
One of the reasons why Tr.im decided to initially shut themselves down is because of the monopoly that Bit.ly has for URL shortening services. Twitter and TweetDeck both use Bit.ly as the default URL shortening services. Now Google, TypePad, and CBS has embraced Bit.ly for shortening the URLs of their content.
One of the reasons why Bit.ly has become the preferred choice for URL shortening is because of their constant service upgrades. Last month Bit.ly started to track what links are malicious in content and warns users before sending them to the link.
Within the last few weeks, Google added Bit.ly to Google Reader’s “send-to” feature. This feature allows anyone using Google Reader to send Bit.ly links on Twitter to their followers.
TypePad added a feature that generates Bit.ly links on Twitter for new blog posts. Bit.ly statistics have also been added into TypePad’s dashboard. All TypePad users will see this feature integrated by this fall.
CBS is also launched a new service called cbs.bit.ly. This service tracks the URLs on CBS’ website that has been shortened and tracks how many people clicked on the shortened links.
Nambu has decided to restore and open their website Tr.im because many people protested when they said that they were planning to shut it down. Nambu said that they were planning to shut down Tr.im because Bit.ly is the default URL shortening service on Twitter. Tr.im said that Bit.ly and Twitter are closely involved with each other which gives Twitter application developers a disadvantage.
Below are some of the additional sentiments written on the Tr.im blog:
1. Twitter has stacked the URL shortening business opportunity overwhelmingly in bit.ly’s favour, as twitter.com currently operates. This is not whining, as some have suggested, but a simple reality. If we post a link to this blog article by its title Twitter switches our tr.im URL to a bit.ly URL.
bit.ly has a monopoly position that cannot be challenged with reasonable investment or innovation unless Twitter offers choice. This is a basic reality of challenging monopolies. bit.ly has deep personal connections and agreements with Twitter that we simply cannot compete with. And it is our humble opinion that this type of favoritism will become an issue for all Twitter developers.
2. We too want to see tr.im live on, but feel we can only transition it to another party committed to ensuring the links are not highjacked in any way. A contract for sale to an unknown group or individual simply cannot guarantee that.
3. We have no interest in framing tr.im URLs, or adding interstitial advertising to redirects, and some have suggested we do, or others would do with tr.im should they acquire it. We will simply never do that out of respect for the fact that users created tr.im URLs based on this commitment. We do not see that as a viable revenue model as well, as it is not expected or welcomed by the individual visiting a shortened link.
URL shortening service Bit.ly gained a lot of ground when TweetDeck, a desktop application built on Adobe AIR for making Twitter easier, made the service a default. Twitter has roughly 20 million users that are actively clicking on short Bit.ly URLs which redirects them to interesting content.
Like Twitter, the problem with Bit.ly is that the service did not have any sort of revenue model. However Bit.ly raised $2 million in VC funding from Betaworks, O’Reilly AlphaTech Ventures, Social Leverage, SoftTech VC, and Ron Conway. Today Bit.ly General Manager Andrew Cohen revealed an idea to how they plan to make money in an interview with Wired.
Cohen said that Bit.ly is planning to take the shortened links and creating a real-time news service that will work in a similar format as Twitter trends. The news service would feature the most clicked links.
“We’re seeing more than a billion clicks in the course of a month,” stated Cohen. “Looking at that volume of data, we can see the most interesting and the most important content that is being shared across the whole of the real-time web.”
Twitter is rumored to be considering an outright acquisition of Bit.ly. I would be surprised if Twitter considers actually buying out Bit.ly when it is not difficult to create a URL shortening service yourself.
Amit Chowdhry | May 11, 2009 | 591 views | Comments Categorized under Bit.ly, TinyURL
Thanks to Twitter switching their default URL shortening service from TinyURL, Bit.ly is now the shortest URL service online today. Bit.ly currently has a 46.71% market share and TinyURL now has a 42.29%. About one month ago, TinyURL had a 75% market share and Bit.ly had only about 13%.
Ever since the growth in Twitter’s popularity, URL shortening services have been growing. Some companies have made shorter URLs around their services like TechCrunch and Digg. Some other examples of URL shortening services include Is.gd, ff.im, cli.gs, and ow.ly.
Bit.ly has been growing rapidly with the help of Twitter. People are constantly using Bit.ly to shorten URLs of stories, images, and videos that people want to share with their Twitter followers. Bit.ly was created under Betaworks, an incubation firm that helped sell Summize to Twitter last year. Betaworks has taken Bit.ly and is spinning it out as a separate, well-funded company.
O’Reilly AlphaTech Ventures and several other investors plugged $2 million into the URL shortening service. Other investors include Social Leverage, SoftTech VC, and Ron Conway. Bryce Roberts of O’Reilly will join the Board of Directors at Bit.ly.
Just last week alone, about 20 million URLs have been shortened using Bit.ly. That number is increasing by 10% every week. The only source of revenue Bit.ly has is Google Ads that are scattered around their homepage. This is a similar approach to their biggest competitor TinyURL.com. TinyURL depends mainly on donations and Google Ads too.
